Mark Schaan (’97): On Meaningful Risks

As a celebration of the Loran Scholars Foundation’s core values of character, service, and leadership, and its challenge to scholars to take meaningful risks in service of others, we have asked members of our community to reflect on meaningful risks and what constitutes #risksforgood. Dr. Mark Schaan
(Loran Scholar ’97), Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of the Strategy and Innovation Policy Sector at Innovation, Science, and Economic Development submitted the following reflection as part of the series.

“Risk selection, and the activities associated with the management of risk, are central to ordering, function and individual and cultural identity.”

-Deborah Lupton, Risk

“Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head.”

-Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

My reflection tried to unpack what I think about and how I have tried to live out risks for good, or what I sometimes think of as meaningful risks. Perhaps being surrounded by risk considerations aplenty in relation to this COVID-19 pandemic, or that I am just mentally exhausted by a year of intense work under strange circumstance, but I had difficulty finding an entry point for how to appropriately contextualize these feelings and the actions I have taken related to meaningful risk.

Unsurprisingly, my first contemplation was through wearing my policy wonk hat (which some have suggested is less hat and more DNA). I rooted back to work I had done in my graduate studies on the articulation, labelling, and quantification of risk and its impacts on trust and societal cohesion. This spawned a thousand questions: whose risks are we talking about? Who is absorbing the risk? What makes the taking of the risk good? Again, good for who? If it’s meaningful, in what way?

All of these are likely fair questions, and I may come back to a few of them as I meander my way through some considerations here. My second take, however, was more existential and personal. Have I really actually taken fundamental risks? Have they been meaningful? As an individual who has been afforded exceptional privilege, I know too well that many of my risks were of far less personal consequence than for others afforded less structural status and opportunity. That said, I was able to think through a few key moments in my life that felt like principled or character-shaping choices. Coming out as queer was certainly one, for at the time it prompted personal chaos and massive uncertainty and emotional pain. Good here was mostly personal, but it did create a profound experience that has motivated my continued pursuit of a safe and open environment for others. But then there are others less obvious — like the risk to admit that the grind of my Masters degree took such a personal toll as to render me plagued with overriding insecurity. And the risk, or choice, or foolishness to carry on through it and my subsequent degree as a character lesson and a commitment to learning and growth, notwithstanding its disconnect from my previous, more-linear conception of action-to-goal. All of that has shaped my broader pursuit of good — recognizing that the immediate goal may not actually be the most meaningful. And there have certainly been others, some of which I’ll get to.

It is probably worth calling out, at outset, that I’m not sure I’m yet a reasonable arbiter in the exercise of evaluating one’s risks, for good, meaning, or otherwise. For one, it is hard to fully understand risk at the outset. As a paraphrased, attributed-to-Harvey Milk quote puts it, “kid, you are going to have so many wonderful friends and lovers, and it won’t be until the end of your life that you know which was which.” I feel a bit the same about meaningful risk choices. I have made life decisions that I didn’t perceive as risky in the slightest, which upon reflection, were both a gamble and also impactful. Similarly, I have agonized over decisions that seemed completely fraught, only to realize they were a nothingburger and a far cry from two roads diverged. And so maybe perhaps this is the first potential snippet of something useful in this reflection. Namely, that while there will come times in our lives where we will need to make dramatic or choices of seismic impact, most of them will be far more profound as the accumulate — that one choice will lead to another to another, and so will be less the battlefield decision to take or not take a given course, but instead an accumulated weightiness that can become definitive and perhaps even restrictive or narrowing over time. As a wise mentor once counseled, “Mark, there is unlikely a bad decision you can make on this one. Even if it were to be a wrong fit, you have the skills and networks and capacities to course correct and retool.” Thus, perhaps it is not the decision itself but the accumulation of decisions that start to determine and cast meaning.

This raises a number of ideas worth dwelling on: reflexivity, feedback loops, and accumulated understanding. Then maybe I’ll turn the tables and talk a little bit about principles and values, and rooting risk in our core premise.

I would say reflexivity is at the core of both my policy wonkish and existential considerations of meaningful risks. That is, I have constantly tried to look at myself and contemplate what’s working, what’s failing, and where and how I need to rethink my actions and approaches. Whether policy-wise, as I graduated beyond early Party politics that came from my precocious desire to understand leadership, to my ongoing role now as a non-partisan, professional policy framer, or existentially as I tried to need external affirmation less, all of it was a process of constant reconsideration — of facts, feelings, and values. Don’t get me wrong, a huge chunk of this is rooted in my people-pleasing, validation-seeking natural tendencies, which privileges internal reconsideration. But it has become a useful practice ( whether motivated initially by an acute EQ feeling that something in the force is off, or not) to take the time to self-reflect and think things through.

I would say the time when I was most active in the Ten Oaks Project, and particularly in helping to found Project Acorn, was ground-breaking in this respect. This was per my previous point, a pretty unthinking choice or risk. It was a simple set of related actions: move to a new city; get introduced to an interesting organization by a great friend (and fellow Loran alumni); agree to be on a Board; and jump in with both feet. However, this would prove to be groundbreakingly meaningful. First, because I arrived as a pretty sheltered, elite-leaning fish-out-of-water chucked into a social-justice rooted, equity-seeking, largely female-queer-led collective, run on consensus. But also because I was transformed as I meaningfully devoted much of any time and resource I had to getting my hands dirty in building a safer space for the children and youth of 2SLGBTQ+ communities, identifies, and families. And the risks in radical community-building weren’t low — financially, reputationally, or personally (particularly as I had to open up to new ways of working and thinking). And the ‘good’ has been an organization that I am still proud to be associated with — driven and fuelled by intentionality, unflinching commitment to community-building, and fuelling an anti-oppressive approach to the needs of others. Upon consideration, the practice of integrating new information and reconsidering things that I had once thought to be fundamental, was full of growth, push, and meaning — for me, and hopefully for the broader environment.

But setting out to take meaningful risks and live a life ‘for the good’ also takes recalibration and a recentring. And this takes fearless feedback loops. I don’t believe I would have been able to continue to put myself out in the pursuit of good and meaning without my crew. In just the last five years alone, I can think of countless moments when my best friend and my partner have served as claxons, warning me that I’d lost the plot. Sucked into the self-inflated drama of a new work assignment, only my partner could remind me that the real risk was to lose a commitment to family in favour of a ‘job well done’ from the Deputy Minister. The same could be said for my best friend who has continued to keep me honest when what looks ‘good’ or ‘meaningful’ doesn’t spend nearly enough time listening to or contemplating the thoughts and needs of others. So, meaningful risks are rarely individual; they are collective, owned not just by their actors and those who endorsed them, but also by those who reigned them in, kept them whole, and pushed them to choose and listen carefully.

And if risk choices aren’t definitively individual, they are also rarely singular. This accumulation I spoke of earlier can become the solidifying or narrowing of one’s aperture for consideration of the possible, but also the foundations for making a continuity or practice of choices for good. Both of those sound horrid if taken the wrong way: namely, that one’s initial choice may ultimately preclude future ones, or that one can get away with a push in the right direction and the belief that momentum will preserve the course. I don’t mean either. What I do mean is that the meaning and the ‘good’ continues to build and accumulate, if we let it. So, the meaningful risk decision is likely one we need to keep making. My scintilla of contribution to policy theory through my graduate work was that policy-making is dynamic and continuous, not singular and dramatic. I think the same about life choices.

Here I think about being queer and being a public servant, and being a queer public servant as well. My meaningful risk to be myself wasn’t a one-time thing at the age of 20 on the eve of Y2K. It has been a continuous decision, and sometimes risk, to assert or contemplate my orientation and its otherness, and to learn, live, and love by it. Similarly, my decision to pursue ‘public service’ wasn’t just something I could coast on since 2006, having decided to serve my country with the brains I have been lucky to have had so ably enriched. It is a regular and repeated questioning of how and whether I am adding value, and a meaningful commitment to using my place of privilege to try and seek out impactful and meaningful outcomes. And finally, it is in openly wearing my queer public servant identity and choosing, day by day, and meeting by meeting, that I continue to make these risks or choices ‘good’ or ‘meaningful’–and it is likely only in this accumulation that they will amount to much.

Now to contradict myself, I will say that there are some fundamental aspects of meaning-making that are truly values-based decisions at outset: to volunteer or not, with the time one has available; to give of one’s means, to the ability one has. There are likely others. It is important to isolate (ideally though ongoing reflection and critique) those values we just need to make choices to live out. It was in my undergraduate crisis of identity that I tried to nail down a bit more what I was for, per say. That practice of trying to delineate that which was truly authentic and that which was an affect largely for the purposes of conforming or gaining acceptance has been hugely valuable to distilling core premise values for those times when you really do need to go by your gut. I have added to this with a research practice of my grad school days, namely the ‘snowball method’ for articulating and refining a central thesis. I try and do this on a personal level — constantly rolling in new experiences and choice moments to further capture how I want to reflect my values and beliefs. Thus, my gut isn’t just a hardwired gift of an origin moment, but a muscle that continues to get stronger to steer me in the right direction and towards things that I truly care about, particularly when trade-offs abound.

But, for all the rest, it’s probably worth muddling our way through. I certainly have, trying to be reflexive, open to being called out and in, and adding to the ongoing accumulation of my choices with the hopes of living a life of meaning and impact for the good of my communities. We’ll just have to wait and see what the outcomes are at the end –when I may be, amongst others, in a better place to judge.